This invention relates to magnetic switches. More particularly, this invention relates to an apparatus for causing multiple magnetic switches to switch in a synchronized manner.
Numerous magnetic modulator applications including particle beam accelerators, high power linear induction voltage adders and laser drivers require the timing of the output pulses be synchronized both to the trigger pulse and between multiple machines. The timing drift on the output of a magnetic modulator can be separated into two categories. Slow changes such as core heating and prime power supply drift cause slow steady timing drifts that can be easily compensated by monitoring the output timing and slowly adjusting the trigger timing to compensate. Random shot to shot variations due to main power supply ripple, primary switch jitter and reflections that effect the bias state of the switches from shot to shot and therefore the timing, require a compensation mechanism that is fast enough to act between shots.
Techniques have been developed to compensate for both of these types of time shifts. The most generalized of these utilize a combination of precision charge voltage control and trigger timing compensation based on measurement of the charge voltage and bias currents just before a shot. While this type of jitter control has been used with great success, it involves the complexity of both microprocessors and analog circuitry in the feedback loop, and it requires calibrations to be established and maintained that correlate the required timing offsets to the measured bias and charge voltage offsets.